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Clang, Chromium, ZFS Improve On FreeBSD

04-23-2010, 01:20 PM

Phoronix: Clang, Chromium, ZFS Improve On FreeBSD

Daniel Gerzo with the FreeBSD project has issued a status report concerning work going on within FreeBSD and related projects for the first quarter of this year. Catching our interest in particular were the updates surrounding LLVM/Clang as the compiler for FreeBSD's base, the Chromium web browser porting efforts to FreeBSD, and ZFS file-system enhancements...

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Why are they keeping the Chromium patches to themselves for a year? Would that not render them useless when they are finally open sourced because the Chromium project is moving so quickly and waste the Chrmoium project's developer resources because of the duplicated effort?

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Why are they keeping the Chromium patches to themselves for a year? Would that not render them useless when they are finally open sourced because the Chromium project is moving so quickly and waste the Chrmoium project's developer resources because of the duplicated effort?

Well, they are wasting their efforts in switching to LLVM/Clang in the first place. GCC is a great, mature and very well supported piece of software, there is, as of now, virtually no reason to switch. (Unless you don't like the license, which is just stupid.)

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Well, they are wasting their efforts in switching to LLVM/Clang in the first place. GCC is a great, mature and very well supported piece of software, there is, as of now, virtually no reason to switch. (Unless you don't like the license, which is just stupid.)

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Well, they are wasting their efforts in switching to LLVM/Clang in the first place. GCC is a great, mature and very well supported piece of software, there is, as of now, virtually no reason to switch. (Unless you don't like the license, which is just stupid.)

They don't like gpl3 - that's why FreeBSD still uses gpl2 gcc and I think the main reason they are working on clang/llvm. FreeBSD likes the BSD licence - what's wrong with not using a restrictive licence like GPL3? Many commercial contributors find BSD much more attractive than Linux for this reason.

Anyway I think users are able to install whatever they like from Ports, and GPL3 GCC is available in there if you want to use it.

As I said, there is no reason, besides the license, to switch the system's compiler to LLVM. If you want to write a compiler/virtual machine/whatever yourself, then LLVM is what you should use, but, as a system compiler, switching to it (besides the license difference) is pointless.

And no, its not the same - ICC is not free software

They don't like gpl3 - that's why FreeBSD still uses gpl2 gcc and I think the main reason they are working on clang/llvm. FreeBSD likes the BSD licence - what's wrong with not using a restrictive licence like GPL3?

What's wrong with the BSD license? Nothing, really, except it allows everyone to plagiarize your work without giving anything back. Cedega, remember how it got created? That made WINE change its license to LGPL. I'm a developer myself, and if I release something as open/free software I don't want any proprietary company to steal my work, and GPL helps me with that. The only thing it restricts is the theft of my work.

Many commercial contributors find BSD much more attractive than Linux for this reason.

'Contibutors'? I think you've used the wrong word. Linux has way more contributors than BSD ever had. (You read Phoronix, right? So you should know that BSD is lagging behind Linux in many aspects.)

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As I said, there is no reason, besides the license, to switch the system's compiler to LLVM. If you want to write a compiler/virtual machine/whatever yourself, then LLVM is what you should use, but, as a system compiler, switching to it (besides the license difference) is pointless.

The reason is that llvm will be a better compiler it is allready faster and better designd then gcc and its c performance is getting close to gcc (c++ is still in alpha stage) as to replacing gcc it wont llcm and clang are targeted at c, c++ and obj-c only unlike gcc which supports a bunch of other languages.

What's wrong with the BSD license? Nothing, really, except it allows everyone to plagiarize your work without giving anything back. Cedega, remember how it got created? That made WINE change its license to LGPL. I'm a developer myself, and if I release something as open/free software I don't want any proprietary company to steal my work, and GPL helps me with that. The only thing it restricts is the theft of my work.

many would argue thats what is right with the bsd license. The people that use it dont care who uses there software and dont mind if they dont give anything back because in most cases people would choose the free software which the software you buy is based off of. And theft of your work? its gpl'ed is free so its not possible to steal any more than its possible to steal bsd licensed software.

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It's only free for completely non-commercial use. Thanks for that, by the way, i didn't realize that was true. But really there aren't any big distros that i know of which don't have some sort of commercial side to them, except for the really minor ones. And those probably don't have the manpower to get every single one of their packages compiling in a different compiler, especially when there are so many other things they could be focusing on instead. Even Michael couldn't use it in his Phoronix reviews, because he makes money off the website.

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The reason is that llvm will be a better compiler it is allready faster and better designd then gcc and its c performance is getting close to gcc (c++ is still in alpha stage) as to replacing gcc it wont llcm and clang are targeted at c, c++ and obj-c only unlike gcc which supports a bunch of other languages.

Right now it is not better (in terms of generated object code's quality), in the future - maybe. But, right now it is not, so again, there is no real reason to switch to it.

its gpl'ed is free so its not possible to steal any more than its possible to steal bsd licensed software.